Part One

Perceptions of truth: Alien abduction, Part One

In Part One, I started by speaking of my experience with Night Terror/Sleep Paralysis, and from there discussed how there is a movement in psychiatric care to treat people who report having being abducted by aliens as if those victims' experiences were real, whether or not an abduction itself actually took place.

Today we will take about media distortions of alien abduction reports, and look at reasons why someone might set up an alien abduction hoax. We'll also look at some commonalities in the things that scare us across cultures.

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Media Manipulations of Reality

I am not making the argument that there are aliens and they abduct people, and I'm not making the argument that they are not. These things are almost impossible to prove.

Understanding What We Can't See - Conspiracy, "Debunking", and Absence of Evidence - Part One (UPDATED)
Understanding What We Can't See - Conspiracy, "Debunking", and Absence of Evidence - Part Two

What makes the issue even more contentious is the media tendency to distort the things that we know actually happened. Sometimes, there are hoaxes, for example. Then the media does what the media almost always does...lie.

For example, in the movie Fire in the Sky, the sheriff was portrayed as supporting the logging crew's claims; in real life not so much:
"Sheriff Skeptical of Story: Saucer Traveler Hiding After Returning To Earth". The Victoria Advocate. Associated Press, Nov 13, 1975.

Likewise, a lot of focus was put on the fact that the men had passed lie detector tests; not so much attention was paid to the process of the testing:

APRO and the National Enquirer had arranged an earlier secret polygraph test for Travis with John J. McCarthy, the most experienced polygraph examiner in the state of Arizona. McCarthy found Travis to be attempting "gross deception," and pronounced the abduction story a hoax.
Sheaffer, Robert. (1981). The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence. Prometheus Books

A more rigorous investigation by Philip J. Klass (1989) discovered that the case was a hoax, that the lie detector test was flawed, and the abduction a "put- up job" to make money."
Nickell, Joe. (1992). Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFOs, Psychics, & Other Mysteries. Prometheus Books

A comment on the Amazon page for the last book:
a book on finding normal, everyday reasons for things that make people think that their houses are haunted. Since the majority of "paranormal phenomena" have, in actuality, perfectly normal and mundane causes, this book has far more useful information in it than any other "paranormal" book out there.
Simply put, if you want to know what is "paranormal", you absolutely have to be able to distinguish what is "normal"

Back to the Walton case and the media, the movie didn't mention something that might have been relevant to getting at the truth of the case:

Walton, his older brother, and his mother were described by the Navajo County, Arizona sheriff as "longtime students of UFOs"
Wiki

But why hoax in the first place?

I once worked with a guy took part in a Bigfoot hoax that hit the national news. I didn't know it, but a co-worker had found out and spread the rumor (the co-worker didn't like this guy); I looked up and it was pretty interesting. I'm going to avoid some details on this so as not to identify the guy.

The guy had been a bonafide hero, and had gotten injured during the action; he set up the Bigfoot hoax while recovering. The guy was pretty honest, pretty professional, pretty smart, but he had a smartass side. His mother might have described him as "mischievious".

I never asked him about the hoax, as the guy never brought it up himself. Looking at the Walton case, money was suggested a reason for the hoax. This guy wasn't a money grubber type...and if I had to guess, I would say it was the ultimate practical joke.

I'm not suggesting that abduction stories are always or even mostly hoaxes; don't forget that there is always a possibility that any given abduction report has been intentionally faked.

Back to Night Terrors already?

It's no coincidence that many of the same sorts of experience that "abductees" have are the same that people who suffer from Night Terror/Sleep Paralysis endure. In abduction cases:

basic descriptive characteristics of the experience are relatively constant among subjects.
Misidentified Flying Objects? An Integrated Psychodynamic Perspective on Near-Death Experiences and UFO Abductions

This similarity is often discussed as the cause of abduction reports:
Abduction by Aliens or Sleep Paralysis? (Skeptical)
Sleep Paralysis and Alien Abduction
Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abduction

Some of the common aspects in both abduction reports and sleep paralysis are:

• fear and terror
• immobility or paralysis
• a sense of impending doom
• sinister or demonic presences
• intense light
• humming or buzzing noises

Am I suggesting that abduction reports are the result of Night Terrors? While that may be a possibility, I don't think it's the case across the board. I do think there is a commonality of experience, and that this commonality is also present in many of the myths of humanity and in our folk lore, even across cultures.

Look at some of the descriptions of the "presences"; thin gray bodies, large heads, dark eyes. Vampires, anyone?

These types of experiences have been recognized as occurring across humanity.
The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society)

Conclusion

The point is not that abductions do or do not happen; the point is that regardless of whether the abductions actually occurred, the people making the claims often believe that the event actually did occur. These experiences are real to them. And that is going to bring us to Part Three, and what the hell reality really is...